Tests were ordered on all Japanese nuclear plants after the Fukushima disaster. Photograph: Kyodo/Reuters

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] was forced to increase the amount of cooling water being injected into the No 2 reactor after its temperature soared to 73.3C earlier this week.

By Tuesday night, the temperature had dropped to 68.5C at the bottom of the reactor’s containment vessel, where molten fuel is believed to have accumulated after three of Fukushima Daiichi’s six reactors suffered meltdown after last year’s tsunami disaster.

The temperature at the bottom of the No 2 reactor vessel had risen by more than 20C in the space of several days, although it remained below the 93C limit the US nuclear regulatory commission sets for a safe state known as cold shutdown. Tepco said it had also injected water containing boric acid to prevent a nuclear chain reaction known as re-criticality.

The operator said the sudden rise in temperature did not call in to question the government’s declaration in December that all three damaged reactors had achieved cold shutdown.

“The temperature of the reactor pressure vessel seems to be close to peaking out,” Junichi Matsumoto, a Tepco spokesman, told reporters.

Late last year, however, the minister in charge of the response to the Fukushima disaster, Goshi Hosono, conceded that officials had no idea about the exact location of molten uranium fuel but assumed that it had come to rest at the bottom of its containment vessels.

In addition, the corporate media has all but ignored extremely high levels of nuclear radioactive contamination
recently detected in Japan. “The latest joint US and Japan survey shows extremely high levels of nuclear
radioactive contamination, with radiation levels higher than Chernobyl evacuation limits, now span over 800
kilometers in Japan,” writes Alexander Higgins.

(NaturalNews) As the famous physicist Dr. Michio Kaku said on April 4th, “The situation at Fukushima is relatively stable now… in the same way that you are stable if you hang by your fingernails off a cliff, and your fingernails begin to break one by one.” (http://bigthink.com/ideas/37705). That same article also refers to the Fukushima damage assessment by the NRC’s Nuclear Safety Team, which concluded that “cooling to the core of Unit 1 might be blocked by melted fuel and also by salt deposits left over from the use ofsea water.”

That’s the same seawater, of course, that has been sprayed onto thefuel rodsto prevent them from going Chernobyl. The unfortunate side effect of boiling off tens of thousands of gallons of sea water, however, is thatis leaves behind a lot of salt.Japannow appears to have an abundance ofradioactivesea saltthat’s unfortunately caked on top of the spentfuelrods and actually preventing much more water from reaching those rods. In a sense, sprayingsaltwater on spent nuclear fuel rods is sort of like spraying them with a slow-acting insulation. It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before that insulation make it impossible for water to keep the rods below meltdown temperatures.

Meanwhile, theMinistry of Economics, Trade and Industryhas mysteriously stopped reporting the dry wellradiationreading in Reactor No. 1. Why would they do that? Because no readings are far more politically correct than extremely high readings, of course. It all happened right after an “off-the-charts”readingof radiation in the drywell of Reactor No. 1, which TEPCO officials quickly dismissed as a broken radiation gauge (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/1110…). Sure, it probably is broken by this point due to its exposure to massive doses of radiation!
The only way a drywell reading can attain such high readings, by the way, is if the nuclear fuel rods have breached their containment core.

Some of the readings coming out ofFukushimaare admittedly “immeasurable,” reported NHK World:

“A radiation monitor at the troubled Fukushima Daiichinuclear power plantsays workers there are exposed to immeasurable levels of radiation. The monitor told NHK that no one can enter the plant’s No. 1 through 3 reactor buildings because radiation levels are so high that monitoring devices have been rendered useless. He said even levels outside the buildings exceed 100 millisieverts in some places.”(http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english…)

The truth gets diluted far more than the radiation

You’re not supposed to know any of that, of course. Although themainstream mediaclaims that all the deadly iodine-131 gets dissipated across thePacific Oceanbefore it can reach North America, the greater truth is that the facts about Fukushima are diluted and dispersed long before they reach our shores. The result is an ongoing dangerous cover-up of what’s really happening there.

The mainstream media, of course, is blatantly engaged in an effort to suppress any scary-sounding information that might emerge about Fukushima. For example, a Forbes blog entitled“Radiation Detected In Drinking Water In 13 More US Cities, Cesium-137…”which contained the text, “Milk samples from Phoenix and Los Angeles contained iodine-131 at levels roughly equal to the maximum contaminant level permitted byEPA…” has mysteriously disappeared, leaving just an empty shell of a page in its place. See the following link to find out if they’ve brought it back yet:http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffmcmahon…

With a few exceptions, the only stories that appear to be allowed to remain online are those that claim current radiation levels are “harmless.” For example, this story from AZCentral.com parrots the usual “don’t worry about radioactivemilk” line:

Testing of milk samples inArizonashows radiation levels that are thousands of times lower than a federal threshold that would cause authorities to take action, a state oversight agency said Friday. While the Arizona Department of Health Services has logged some concerns from the public following the Japanese nuclear incident, there is no reason to stopdrinkingmilk, a department spokeswoman said. “I don’t want to trivialize it, but it is trivial,” Laura Oxley said. “It’s thousands of times below any action level that we would need to do.”(http://www.azcentral.com/business/a…)

Here come the pumping trucks

There, you’ll see a massive Russian cargo plane gulping down a 95-ton “Putzmeister” concrete pumping truck that’s being flown to Fukushima in order to spray more water on the nuclear fuel rods which continue to spew deadly radiation. The fuel rods are still indangerof reaching criticality (further meltdown with explosions), so the plan for now is to keep hosing them down with water.

This water, of course, becomes highly radioactive and eventually gets released into the Pacific Ocean. Right now, the amount of radioactive water being released tops50,000 tons(over 12 million gallons). (http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english…)

This process of dumping radioactive water into the Pacific will reportedly continue fordecadesunless some other clever solution can somehow be put in place. Alongside all this, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), has mastered the art of Jedi mind tricks, saying, “We cannot say what the outlook is for the next stage… As soon as possible we would like to achieve stable cooling and set a course towards controlling radiation.” (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011…)

In other words,these are not the droids you’re looking for.

Notice, if you read between the lines, he is admitting the radiation is NOT controlled, and stable cooling has NOT been achieved. And really all they’re doing ishopingto have a plan on how to somehow achieve that.

Far from stable

Remember when we were told two weeks ago that Fukushima was “on the verge of stabilizing?” How’s that for clever spin?

In contrast, ABC News (which has probably had the very best reporting among the MSM) recently carried this sentence: “A confidential assessment by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission obtained by The New York Times suggests that the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant is far from stable. The report concludes that the Fukushima plant is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely.” (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/fukush…)

…though a major leak in a maintenance pit of the plant has been plugged, there is still a great likelihood that significant amounts of radioactive water will continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean; the worldwide Just-In-Time manufacturing cycle has been interrupted; and increased levels of radiation have been detected on the U.S. East Coast.

Remarkably,CNNis now carrying a story that appears to openly acknowledge the Fukushima situation may be all but hopeless. Written by Matt Smith, thearticlesays: (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/a…)A month into the crisis, the utility acknowledges, there is no end in sight. The problems are so far “beyond the design capacity” of the plant that the Japanese are working in uncharted territory, said Michael Friedlander, a former senior operator at U.S.nuclear power plants. “No nuclear power plant has ever considered the inability to get on long-term core cooling for more than a week, much less three weeks,” Friedlander said.

Murphy’s Law strikes again

Ah, that pesky Murphy has worked his magic yet again, it seems, interfering with the best-laid plans of arrogant men who stupidly believe they have conquered thelawsof physics by having a backup diesel generator nearby. Now we’re hearing announcements out of Japan that all futurenuclear powerplants must have TWO diesel generators on site, not just one.

Murphy laughs at such ignorance. How is two diesel generators better than one when they’re both fifteen feet under water?

That such a preposterous suggestion is even being considered proves once again just how utterly out of touch with reality the nuclearindustryremains. Why not just pass a government rule that outlaws earthquakes?It would have approximately the same effect.

Exclusive: new photos of Fukushima reactors
Noting that the press has largely turned its resources off of the Fukushima complex, and needing up-to-date information on the status of the damage control efforts there, we secured the most up-to-date satellite photo from DigitalGlobe (dated March 31st), which we analyze below. This is the first photo of the damaged reactor site at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility made available to the public in over a week. That means you, our readers, are the first public eyes anywhere to see this photo.
Drawing upon the expertise of our resident nuclear engineer and Ann Stringer, imaging expert, we conclude that the situation at Fukushima is not stabilized: things are not yet at a place of steady progress in the containment and clean-up efforts. It’s still a dance, forwards and backwards, with the workers making gains here and there and the situation forcing them to react defensively.
In this report, we will tell you what we know for sure, what we are nearly certain of, and what we remain forced to speculate about.
Here is a portion of a much larger image (covering 25 square kilometers in total) showing the reactor complex as of March 31, at roughly mid-day:

Photo Credit, 2011, DigitalGlobe
What We Can See
Here’s what we can directly observe in the larger satellite image:
Steam is still rising from reactors #2, #3 (circled in green) and #4.
Of the four reactor buildings, three are nearly or totally destroyed, while the outside (at least) of the fourth is in relatively better shape.
We can count 7 fire trucks ‘on site’ with another 7 just to the north, all with water lines strung out across the ground.
There is only one ship/vessel to be seen, located inside of the breakwater and nearly as far to the north as it can go inside that boundary.
A significant number of the vehicles that can be seen at the core of the site have not moved since the first released photos on March 12.
There is a parking lot slightly to the north and west with approximately 250 passenger vehicles in it and a side lot with 30 large green tanks neatly arranged in rows.
The rest of the area is one, two, and four lane roads (no traffic at all), worked farmland, residential and commercial areas, mostly empty parking lots, and two baseball diamonds.

Here’s what we don’t see
Nowhere in the 25 km area in the main photo can we find anything that looks like a staging area with a large collection of assets such as tanker trucks, pumpers, cement trucks, piles of pre-staged materials, ambulances, and fire trucks.
The cement pumper truck seen a week ago has been apparently replaced by the boom at reactor #4.
There’s no obvious barge delivering fresh water for the rector cooling efforts as recently reported (it may have come and gone?).
Any obvious changes to the roofs of any of the reactors.
Any people outside the plants working.

Things we can logically conclude
The steam that is venting is a mixed blessing. It implies that cooling water is getting to some hot material, which is a good thing, but it also means that something is hot enough to vaporize water and the continued release of radioactivity into the surrounding environment.
This means that the lack of steam coming from reactor #1 is either a very good sign, or a very bad sign. Good because it could mean that the containment vessels are intact and cooling water is circulating. Bad because it could imply that no water is getting to it and it is a very hot mass right now. According to TEPCO, reactor #1 has had seawater, and now freshwater, circulating through the reactor vessel – and since both containment vessels are intact, we’ll conclude the lack of steam is a good sign.
The situation at Fukushima is going to drag on for years. First there’s the matter of stabilizing the situation which has not yet been fully achieved. Recent surprises in terms of the amounts and locations of radioactivity are one sign that the situation is not fully stabilized. Still, nothing has blown up in quite a while, the steam venting appears consistent, and the major surprises seem to be over for now. While the TEPCO workers are still reacting to things as they arise, these are smaller things than last week, which is another hopeful sign.
The detected presence of neutron beams, I-134, and radioactive chlorine are all strongly supportive of the idea that criticality has resumed. Our best guess is that these are localized pockets, probably of short duration, and do not involve the entire core mass of any particular reactor conflagrating in some gigantic, greenish blob of uncontrolled fission. The geometries of the fuel in relation to neutron moderators requires precise conditions to support sustained fission and so it is rather unlikely to be occurring in anything other than localized pockets. If the entire reactor in its fully operational state was capable of supporting what we might scale to 100% fission, the amount of fission happening after a partial (or complete) meltdown will be a far lesser percentage. Still, any amount of fission is unwelcome at this point because it is adding to the heat and radiation removal difficulties.
The constantly rising levels of radioactivity found in the seawater are a further unwelcome development, but without a proper isotope analysis we cannot conclude anything about the potential resumption of fission from their gross amounts alone. It’s always possible that the leftover fission products are now being washed in larger amounts into the sea for some reason.
Additional Drone Photos
These are the most detailed photos yet to emerge into the public space (released yesterday, March 31, as far as I know), and they are purported to come from a drone flyover on March 20 and 24th. They are really quite good, and worth viewing in their entirety here.
Beginning with reactor 3, one thing we can say is, this thing is a right proper mess:

There’s a significant hole to the left of center that goes deep into the sub-structure (with a strange greenish cast that we’ve not been able to resolve after much conjecture) and it’s clear that this building alone will take a long time to resolve. Read the rest of this entry »